Overclocking ati x1400...

Ok, so I bought a new fujitsu-siemens pi1536 (with x1400 512 mb hypermemory), chuffed to bits with it. Thought I could squeeze a little bit more juice out of the graphics card, so I used powerstrip to overclock it, only problem is that there's no way of monitoring the temperature (I tried ati tray tools but the option's greyed out), and it seems to get a little hotter when idle. I've benched the clocks at 466 for the core and 360 for the memory, cos I'm still a bit of a newbie and would like to have some piece of mind lol. Anyone know of any software I could use to monitor the temperature? or does this card actually need a diode on it to do that?
Just another question, if the card shares half the memory, by ocing it would you be increasing the system memory speed?
Cheers,
Harry

 

I would ask a mod to move this over the gaming forum, you'll get more responses their.

 

ah ok sorry.

 

What is your chipset? (use Everest to find out)
http://www.majorgeeks.com/download4181.html

 

Why would chipset matter while overclocking an X1400?

 

Indeed a weird question from Matt. Anyway, it is possible that the X1400 does not have a temperature sensor (just like my X700). The fan starts spinning when CPU is hot, not GPU so I think that they thought that there was no reason for a sensor (weird if you ask me).

I cannot measure my GPU temps neither. I just hate that!

Charlie

 

annoying isnt it! How are you finding the fujitsu-siemens experience then charlie?
I think im gonna get a fan for this laptop before i push the card any further...by the way i tried overclocking it with powerstrip. got the core up to 500 and the memory to 400. everything was going fine, but had a really nasty crash, lots of artifacts on the screen. Any ideas? Could it be a conflict between catalyst and powerstrip? it seemed after a restart as soon as catalyst loaded itself (after powerstrip) the screen would just be covered in artifacts. Another thing, even though the speeds have increased, i cant really see a noticeable change in performance. In fact it seems to lag even more! IS there something im not doing right here?
Thanks for the help, i appreciate it.
Harry

 

Its very possible the GPU and CPU heatsink are one and the same and so therefore it does not matter that there is no separate GPU temp.

 

before you overclock, you should download fraps to see how much fps you're already getting

then you should use ATT instead of powerstrip. the new version of ATT included with omega 6.9 now works with the x1400

also, i recommend using omega driver instead of the ones from ati as their CCC is a total memory hog and omega drivers are optimized for gaming

In addition, overclocking may give only a slight performance increase. For notebooks a 1-4 fps increase with the x1400 for newer games like fear or oblivion is already a good OC. not all OC gives crazy performance boosts and it also depends on the game, though it shouldn't cause it to lag more. check your fps using fraps or the fps counter in ATT.

very few OC (if any) with the x1400 gives out for example 10fps more in oblivion ,or 15 fps in fear. just not possible with 4 pipelines.

2 things could;ve caused the artifacts, either the chip got so hot that it caused error (i don't think it's this as 500/400 is not really that high) or that is the limit of how high your gpu can go (this is probably the reason).

what you're describing is what looks like your memory speed is too high. i had that crazy artifacting too.

to OC, you should set the core speed to lower then norm, then slowly 5-10mhz at a time OC the memory till it artifacts. then reduce ~10mhz and that would be your highest stable memory OC. repeat the same for the core and you will get the highest stable OC your card can get.

 

fantastic thanks very much. Will do.

 

mkay I've installed the omega drivers with ati tray tools. Everything was going fine, and to a certain extent still is, apart from my games have stopped running properly. It looks like certain textures won't render, and I've tried reinstalling the drivers, resetting all the settings to their defaults, nothing seems to work. This is a problem with both the games currently on my laptop (haven't had time to install the rest), and it's really annoying. They'll load and play, but they look really really strange. I've tested direct 3d, everything seems fine. What could be the problem? I've tried playing about with the compatibility settings, but still no luck. I'm going to try reinstalling the games, see what happens. Perhaps something happened within all these driver changes.
Another small issue; overclocking is disabled in att, can't resolve it. Any ideas?
Thanks very much for all the help, sorry to be a pain

 

Does 3DMark run without problems? If you could give us a screenshot of the problems you are having that would be helpful.

 

3DMark, and what games are you trying to play? Can you take screenshots of the errors? Will anything else 3D run, such as your screensavers? It's a very vague question you posed... much like "Doctor, I hurt. What's wrong?"

 

lol yeah...I decided to back out of this one. Ive reinstalled the catalyst 6.9 drivers, ive decided to stop messing about with the hardware. Everything seems to be working fine now, the clocks have reset themselves. I flashed the bios with an update from fujitsu-siemens, so everything's cool now. Probably not worth overclocking this machine, it seems you can get a bit obsessed with trying to get a minor amount of extra performance. Thanks a lot everyone anyway, this is definitely one of the best forums I've been on.
Cheers,
Harry